Is there an emoticon for perplexed excitement tainted by an unshakable sense of anticlimax? (How about ;-S ?) If so, that emoticon would have been littered all over Twitter the past 24 hours, as news spread that Conan O'Brien will be returning triumphantly to late-night this fall on TBS.

Hmmm. Okay. ;-S.

We¹re guessing this wasn't the dramatic phoenix-rising conclusion Team Coco had been daydreaming about. No glitzy new three-hour juggernaut on Fox. No paradigm-busting mind-melter like, say, broadcasting a show directly to your Xbox. Instead, Conan will now be featured as a lead-in for Lopez Tonight (a show you don’t watch) on TBS (a cable channel you don’t watch, or at least never notice when you’re watching it). It's not just basic cable, it's unsexy basic cable. Twitter Nation's glee over Coco’s return was widely undercut by the fact that it's very hard to name three other original shows on his new channel. (No, Lopez Tonight doesn't count.)

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